Act now against the Schengen attacks!

An important pillar of European Integration is currently under threat as the idea of free movement within a borderless Europe is at stake after the arbitrary reintroduction of checks on the Franco-Italian border as well as Denmark's decision to reinstate random customs controls at its borders.

In the last days, many of our members and our sympathizers expressed, in different ways, their opposition to a potential reform of Schengen. JEF-Europe strongly supports such initiatives and invites all JEFers to use their creativity to launch initiatives all over the continent!

Listen to our radio intervention about Schengen on China Radio International (25 May 2011)

What can YOU do?

• Facebook profile picture: In order to assist everyone in this reaction, we designed a profile picture for Facebook which is already available. You can find it on the JEF-Europe Facebook Fanpage. We invite our members feeling concerned to change their profile picture accordingly. 

• Facebook fanpage: A facebook page “Europe without Borders” was created, in partnership with our friends from European Alternatives. We invite you to like it and to use it as an amplifier for your actions and your mobilization against border control in Schengen. Please post all your actions on this page (e.g. as Facebook events) so everyone is directly updated on the plans of your section!

• Pictures: All the pictures of your events will be proudly published on our Flickr account, please forward them to schengen@jef.eu. Feel free to also post them on the "Europe without Borders" page on facebook!

• The New Federalist: We invite you to personally contribute with articles for The New Federalist in one of the four languages of our online publication (thenewfederalist.eu, taurillon.org, treffpunkteuropa.de and eurobull.it) or to motivate your members to do so. Next week we plan a thematic week about Schengen. Your contribution is needed! You can send your articles to tnf@jef.eu.

• Press Releases: JEF-Europe already issued a Press Release on May 17 ('Reform of Schengen: JEF-Europe condemns the re-establishment of any internal borders'). If the news bring more outrageous events, we will react and issue new Press Releases in the coming weeks. Don't hesitate to send your ideas to schengen@jef.eu.

Initiatives of JEF-sections

So far, on Wednesday 25 May, some actions were planned by some of our sections, in Brussels, Paris and Prague. JEFers would ask people in the street to show their passports or IDs.

JEF-Germany also started to contact other sections in Denmark, Belgium and France in order to launch events at borders where checks might be introduced.

If you are interested by these actions and want to involve your section, we invite you to contact Chloé Fabre for the first one (Brussels, Paris, Prague) and Daniel Matteo and Manja Jacob for the second one (Germany) while putting Michel Gelly on CC. In order to facilitate communication between sections and members, you can find the Who is Who list on our website via the Members´area. Use your network!

JEF-Brussels/ MEP Jo Leinen demolishing
the boarder control in front of the European Parliament

Pan-European action?

Last but not least we keep the idea of a Pan-European action as a possibility for the upcoming weeks/months, if there is enough interest and support from the sections. JEF-Europe, with the support of WG Project-Development is ready to coordinate such action. All your ideas and feedback: schengen@jef.eu.